M&S Food – Traffic Jamming | 2025 — FrankW

M&S Food – Traffic Jamming
Director: Guy Shelmerdine | Prod. Co: Smuggler | Client: M&S Food
Christmas Advert 2025
M&S Food – Traffic Jamming is the festive 2025 Christmas campaign from Marks & Spencer, setting a relatable Christmas Eve traffic jam scene to the classic Driving Home For Christmas. Starring Dawn French alongside the brand’s iconic Fairy, the spot transforms a gridlocked motorway into an impromptu M&S food party full of seasonal treats and humour, blending charm, music and food-centric storytelling.
As VFX TD on the spot, I built and maintained the core FX infrastructure for the film, delivering custom Houdini toolsets and HDAs to efficiently realise both the magical spell-driven elements and the environment effects across shots. This included bespoke particle systems for fairy-dust trails and impact-based magic events with art-directable control via exposed parameters and ramps, plus a comp-oriented AOV pipeline for flexible grading, glow and layering.
For the snowfall seen throughout the film, I developed a camera-frustum projected snow system that scatters particles directly inside the view volume, splits them into depth-based chunks for render layer control (near/mid/far), and supports both one-shot fill and continuous emission modes. This modular setup, robust and parameter first, also outputs per-point attributes like instance_id and chunk groups for Solaris instancing and LOP workflows, as well as preview colour coding during layout.
The work was implemented as reusable HDAs with user-friendly controls: density ramps over depth, frustum overscan, instance variation, pscale jitter, and optional POP integration for simulation dynamics. Created end-to-end in Houdini and production-ready for Solaris/Karma instancing workflows.